PSYCHOLOGIST |SEXOLOGIST | EDUCATOR

Category Archives: Sex

When Robin and I were in Australia I met up with this great guy that I just couldn’t stop agreeing with. Ever have those conversations where half of the time you’re going “exactly!”? Yeah, it was like that. He called it violently agreeing and, obviously, I couldn’t agree more.

I get that when I watch Esther Perel and Dan Savage. Violent agreement.

Sometimes I just get so happy knowing the world is inhabited by numerous great people who are doing and saying amazing things, and although I know I won’t get to meet most of them, it just feels so rich. I could go anywhere and there’s people there, amazing people, everywhere. Connections to be made, things to be learned, experiences to be shared, violent agreements to be had. It’s like knowing your fridge is stocked when you’re not hungry. My friends are amazing and so many other people are too. Violently loving <3.

Dan Savage probably became my hero when he got the president of the United States to tell gay kids that things get better. I mean honestly the whole It Gets Better project was amazing, but that was a whole other kind of amazing. We’re certainly not where we have to be regarding LGBTQ rights, but that was such a powerful thing to happen.

I agree with Dan Savage a lot. Like, a lot.

(Fuck first! GGG!)

But not always.

It took me a little while to understand his position on cheating. I tend to be a bit too black-and-white when it comes to morality, and since lying and deception fall in my ‘bad’ category I’m a little bit unforgiving when it comes to cheating. I think consent is very important in intimate relationships, and having sex with other people without your partner knowing is just so disrespectful. Either let them know you intend to be non-monogamous, allowing them to break up with you if non-monogamy is not for them, or don’t sleep around. I really don’t think lying so you get to keep your relationship is an acceptable thing to do.

But Dan Savage has argued that sometimes, in some situations, cheating might be the lesser of two evils. If you and your partner are financially dependent on each other, or your partner is very ill and breaking up with them would mean they lose health insurance or housing, if there are extreme circumstances, sometimes maybe you need to do what you need to do to stay sane. I guess. I can see that sometimes cheating might be the best option in a collection of sucky options, so it’d still suck, but other options would suck more. I suppose. I’ve become a little bit more open-minded about that, sometimes the world is just not fair and there are no right choices.

And I also agree that, as a society, we’ve placed too much importance on sexual monogamy. Given the fact that a very, very large group of people cheat sometime in their life, perhaps we should take a bit more of a pragmatic attitude towards monogamy. It seems we’re not really good at it, generally. Many of us try, because we desire a monogamous relationship, but many of us fail. Dan Savage thinks we should look at monogamy the way we look at sobriety – it’s hard, sometimes you fall off the wagon, you get back on the wagon. If you only fall off once or twice in you life, you’re good at monogamy, not bad at it.

I guess.

I need this on my wall. So Much.

I don’t know. I’m not monogamous myself, but if I found out my partner had lied to me about such an intimate, personal aspect of our life, I would be devastated. Not because I care much about who he has sex with, but because honesty and respect are fundamental to our relationship. By violating that he would violate something that our whole relationship is based on, it would violate my trust.

When weighing different options, we should take the harm cheating causes into account. People who have been cheated on often feel traumatised, not because they feel sex is so important, but because their trust has been broken and one of the closest relationships in their life was affected. Our connections to others are so important, our attachments so central to our well-being, harming that harms a person in their core.

Losing a loving relationship hurts too, obviously. Being open about wanting to have sex with other people and finding out your partner does not want to be with you if that’s what you’re going to do, that hurts. But the harm you cause when you cheat and they find out is huge. We should not be too nonchalant about cheating in situations where the other options (not cheating, or being honest about wanting sex with others) are actual possible options.

So in this case? I completely disagree with San Savage. Instead, bring the subject up with your husband. Treat him like an adult you can talk to, an adult you can trust, an adult who has the right to make his own decisions about his life. Tell him “hey remember that fetish I have? I’d like to explore that, how do you feel about that?”. And he’ll tell you if he wants to know about it, if he’s okay with it, you can discuss a Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell agreement, or perhaps he’d like to set some boundaries on sexual acts. And if he simply rejects the whole idea and tells you no, well, then you’ll have to decide if cheating is the best of all options. But I think we owe it to each other to respect the trusting, loving relationships we have, and respect each other as adult human beings who get to decide, given all the facts, if they want to be in a relationship with you. Deceiving others into staying is not okay…

In school we were taught to use British English, spelling words like ‘favourite’ instead of ‘favorite’, although later on both American English and British English were accepted, as long as you used them consistently. But honestly I still get them mixed. Almost all of the English I consume is in American English, so it often feels the most natural to me. But I learned, learnt, learned most of my English in Ireland (where my mom’s from) so there’s loads of British English, or rather Irish English, mixed in there as well. It’s like my accent really, a horrible mismatched mix of British, Dutch, Irish and American. My English is still better than your Dutch, though ;).

It often seems that people who oppose things like sex education, birth control, equal rights for gay people and decriminalised sex work just want to make sure that no act of pleasure goes unpunished. We can’t have kids get easy access to condoms because good Lord they might think to use them. We can’t have women selling sexual services without someone being punished because that might send the message that’s it’s fine for two consenting adults to have sex for their own reasons. We can’t provide contraceptives because people might start to believe that you can just have sex and “we’ll have you covered“.

(Read that link by the way because omg Dan Savage yes)

It’s about the punishment of sex.

I wonder how we can change our cultural attitude towards sex. Because for me, sexual rights are not just about human rights and individual freedoms. Our attitude towards our bodies, our pleasure, our nature seems deeply disordered to me. Sex is good for us. Pleasure is good for us. Punishment is not. How wonderful would it be if we celebrated sexuality as a positive aspect of life, if we encouraged all forms of consensual pleasure and intimacy? The world would be a better place if we had more sex :).

I think torturing animals is wrong. I believe people who intentionally torture animals should be punished, that keeping animals means you have to take responsibility for their wellbeing and that animals deserve to have some quality of life. I have a big problem with the way our culture treats animals in factory farming. I’m not opposed to killing animals for our pleasure, I don’t think it’s wrong to keep animals as property, but I think we’re crossing a line when their wellbeing is no longer of any concern at all. Animal cruelty is horrible.

But I don’t think I need an animal’s consent to do things to it. I keep my cat as a pet without asking him if he wanted to stay with me, and if he walked away I’d find him and bring him home because he’s chipped. I had his balls removed without his consent. If I kicked him for fun or cracked his little skull for kicks I should be arrested, if I stopped feeding him that’s abuse, but really there is not a relationship of trust and consent between Poes and I. And there shouldn’t have to be. You can do stuff to animals, just keep their wellbeing in mind and don’t torture them.

So that’s why I have no problem with sex with animals.

I mean sure, if you rape a little bunny that’s wrong. It would be equally wrong if you stuck a big stick up its ear, because you are hurting it. Well yes if you kill it you’re hurting it too, and I have eaten rabbits for my pleasure, but still, don’t do that.

Sexual relationships with animals that don’t involve hurting or killing it? I just don’t see the problem. I don’t care if the animal wants it – I’m quite sure my burger didn’t dream of becoming a burger and that does not matter to me, I’m a recreational meat eater and eat burgers purely for my pleasure. I don’t care if it’s natural – keeping a blog isn’t natural either and I don’t consider that morally wrong. By the way, I once saw a dog face-fuck a three-year-old and when I was little my bunny nearly died when her father raped her little head so hard she could hardly breathe so don’t talk to me about natural. And last but not least: animals are pretty good at expressing themselves so I fear more for the human’s safety!

Our relationship with sex is so messed up. We jerk off cattle to use their sperm for breeding, put our hand and arm up animals’ backsides for all sorts of reasons, but do it for sexual pleasure and everyone loses their minds. We allow pig-bukkake where the sow gets such an overload of sperm her womb gets infected, but come on a cows head and suddenly you’re a criminal.

Sex with animals is NOT illegal in the Netherlands, except when you do it for sexual pleasure. I’m not making this stuff up. You can do anything you want, put your body parts up anything and touch whatever you like, as long as it’s not because it turns you on. Because that would make you a pervert, and perverts are baaaaaad.

Marijke Vonk is a Dutch sex-positive psychologist specialised in working with sexual minorities. Besides working as a therapist, she is a writer and lecturer on various topics concerning sexuality. Main topics on this blog include kink, gender equality, sex workers' rights, non-monogamy and psychology.